Henrik Hoeg on Peel Street Poetry Annual Slam 2018:
The 13th anniversary of Peel Street Poetry, the largest English language open mic poetry night in Hong Kong, brought another night of celebration and verse capped off with the annual slam competition. As happens each year, groups of competitors were given a prompt and only 10 minutes to write a poem in response to that prompt. They battled in groups of five, and one person from each group was selected to go through to the final. The poems published here are from the five finalists, either from their first round or from the final in which the prompt was ‘replicate’. This year the judging panel was comprised of last year’s winner Denis Tsoi, the former director of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival Phillipa Milne, and Peel Street Poetry organisers and Cha contributors Akin Jeje and Henrik Hoeg. Andrew Barker’s “We Wax and Wane and Cannot Replicate”, featured below, is one of a Finalist of 2018’s Peel Street Poetry Annual Slam.
WE WAX AND WANE AND CANNOT REPLICATE
by Andrew Barker
……1
A Performance shone upon the firmament,
B The moon danced like Van Morrison had called
A As light cut into memory and bent
B Itself to that position known by all
C Who watch the orbs above us wax and wane,
D To bask beneath the selentropic glow
C That blesses lovers; once again, again
D We understand from songs of long ago
E That love is light-lit, love shakes up the night,
F When nothing seems to move the time we’ve got,
E Love makes an incident of evening bright
F And helps us keep what should not be forgot.
G With all the smoke and mirrors said and done
G You were that moon-lit, song-struck shining one,
.
……2
A From nights I could not replicate, and yet
B I know each evening has its own intent.
A And fair and square is love’s continual bet
B That nothing really held is ever lent.
C Like death and taxes, truly, I except
D That home away from home found in your eyes,
C So replicate again that firmament
D When what I saw was voluble, it cried
E To me, and what I want from what’s to come,
F That after moon-light each dance will cohere,
E You are that moon-lit song-struck shining one!
F But as the sun arrives our lives should fear
G That what we wanted isn’t what we sought.
G The moon that moves us simply can’t be caught.
Andrew Barker spent his youth working as bricklayer before entering academia and obtaining a BA in English Literature, an MA in Anglo/Irish Literature and a PhD in American Literature. He now works as a university literature lecturer in Hong Kong and releases poetry online through his poetry web channel Mycroft Lectures. He is the author of Snowblind from my Protective Colouring (2010) and Joyce is Not Here: 101 Modern Shakespearean Sonnets (2017). His recent poetry can be viewed on Instagram.